Playboy App for iPad Causing A Stir – And Some Interesting Competition!

13 Aug
Playboy

iPhonegizmo gets a constant stream of emails from App developers and App publishers. Most of them get ignored as they are of no particular interest.  But the latest one proved too weird to ignore. So the iPhonegizmo team checked it out!

The hook: This was not an App – it is a webcam site that can be accessed from the iPhone. As they so politely informed us in their email

It only requires you point your phone’s browser at …. site, to get started. (registration required and adult content)

Thus, it side-steps the issue Playboy has with regard to their application and Apple’s no-nudity policy

So cleverly playing on the current news flap around the latest Playboy App released for iPad – which has some punters agitated because of Apple’s no-nudity in Apps rule.

OK – so we saw it as our duty to our readers to check the site out  – clicked the link and got:

iPhone Porn

OK, we thought, that’s a bit weird! Or maybe these are porn providers with a conscience? Or perhaps they are trying to get to the adult market that have kids and want to reassure them that the content they watch cannot be accessed by their children?

So we clicked on the first link for the “child protection” sites and got:

Parent Web Control

Are they referring to their own sites, we wondered?

But wait, there’s more! Because not all the links provided there were valid. The surfwatch site is no longer available from Google via IE, and – according to domaintools – the site was a malicious site! Here is a screen shot of the site just before it got dropped:

Malaware site

One of the team members here at iPhonegizmo used to work for Google and had the dubious pleasure of having to check adult sites for black hat and malicious tricks. Which they all too often use.

The moral of the story (HAD to say it)  is this: beware of porn sites bearing gifts! One great thing about iTunes is that it is safe to use – for you and your kids!